Spectrogram of speech shaped noise |
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This page demonstrates a new phenomenon that noise turned on and off properly in a time-frequency
representation can produce intelligible speech. More specifically, pure noise masked (or gated) by the ideal binary mask (IBM) yields intelligible speech. Thanks for Arun Narayanan who created this page in Oct. 2012.
See the following papers for describing the basic phenomenon:
Wang D.L., Kjems U., Pedersen M.S., Boldt J.B., and Lunner T. (2008): Speech perception of noise with binary gains. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 124, pp. 2303-2307.
Kjems U., Boldt J.B., Pedersen M.S., Lunner T., and Wang D.L. (2009): Role of mask pattern in intelligibility of ideal binary-masked noisy speech. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 126, pp. 1415-1426.
This demo uses speech shaped noise and the IBM patterns shown below. Can you understand the resulting signal?
Spectrogram of speech shaped noise |
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IBM patterns |
Signal synthesized by gating the speech shaped noise using the above binary mask patterns |
The second demo is based on a digit utterance from the TIDigits corpus.
Spectrogram of clean speech |
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Spectrogram of speech shaped noise
The IBM pattern |
Speech shaped noise
Signal synthesized from the speech shaped noise masked by the IBM |
Spectrogram of factory noise
The IBM pattern |
Factory noise
Signal synthesized from the factory noise masked by the IBM
Signal synthesized from factory noise masked by the IBM for the speech shaped noise |
The next demo is based on an utterance from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ0) corpus:
Spectrogram of clean speech |
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Spectrogram of speech shaped noise
The IBM pattern |
Speech shaped noise
Signal synthesized from the speech shaped noise using the IBM |
Spectrogram of babble noise
The IBM pattern |
Babble noise (32 talker)
Signal synthesized from the babble noise using the IBM
Signal synthesized from the babble noise masked the IBM for the speech shaped noise |
